1. Field
The disclosed embodiments relate to user interfaces and, more particularly, to user interfaces for communicating with other devices.
2. Brief Description of Related Developments
When people speak with each other non-verbal communication such as body movement, hand and face gestures play a large part in the conversation. Hand and face gestures may indicate to others an emotional state of the speaker. For example, when the speaker has a frown on his/her face it generally means that the speaker is sad or upset. When the speaker is smiling it generally means the speaker is in a happy mood. Likewise, when the speaker is frantically waving his/her arms when speaking there may be an indication that the user is excited in some way.
As the individual lifestyles becomes increasingly busy there is less time to sit with friends and family to have a face to face conversation. In addition, people living far away from each other may not be able to have face to face conversations with others. As such, more and more people are using communication devices to hold conversations, as opposed to a face to face talk, to communicate with co-workers, friends, family and the like. However, non-verbal communication such as body movement, hand and facial gestures may be lacking from the conversation. These non-verbal communications are an important part of a conversation as they may indicate to a listener the emotional state of the speaker, they may emphasize what the speaker is saying and the like.
Video calls may be used to enable individuals who are unable to have a conventional face to face conversation (e.g. a conversation where the individuals are physically located next to each other) to converse while looking at each other. However, in video calls usually only the face of the participants are shown on the display of the receiving device. Any facial expressions that do appear on the display of the receiving device may be misinterpreted or hard to see because of, for example, poor display resolution or a small display size, represented on the display at the wrong time due to network lag, and the like. Also due to the limited display size the body movements such as hand gestures may not be visible to the participants of the video call.
It would be advantageous to supplement the video feed in a video call with visualizations that coincide with the content of the call in a manner that is clear to a participant of the call.